# The Great Bed of Ware > Unknown English maker, working from continental ornament prints - c. 1590-1600, with later repairs and alterations > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/great-bed-of-ware-maker/great-bed-of-ware-va/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-23 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown English maker, working from continental ornament prints - **Date:** c. 1590-1600, with later repairs and alterations - **Medium:** Oak, carved and originally painted, with panels of inlaid marquetry - **Dimensions:** 267 x 326 x 338 cm (height x width x depth), per the V&A's own catalogue record. Secondary accounts commonly round this to about 3.38 x 3.26 m, or ten by eleven feet. - **Object type:** Furniture - **Period:** English, late sixteenth century - **Current location:** Victoria and Albert Museum, London - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary The Great Bed of Ware is a carved oak four-poster bed, about three and a third metres on each horizontal side, made around 1590 to 1600 and now at the Victoria and Albert Museum. No bed of comparable scale from the period is known to survive. It spent more than two hundred and fifty years working as a paying tourist attraction at a sequence of inns in Ware, Hertfordshire, before fifty-seven years in a Hoddesdon pleasure garden and, finally, purchase by the V&A in 1931 for 4,000 pounds, after the same museum had turned it down for nothing in 1865.Shakespeare named it in Twelfth Night in 1601 and Ben Jonson gave it its lasting name in 1609, both within a couple of decades of its construction, and before anyone recorded who actually built it. The carpenter's name usually attached to it, Jonas Fosbrooke, comes from a nineteenth-century pantomime, not a sixteenth-century record. The surface carries the carved initials and red wax seals of the guests who slept in it across that whole span, which the V&A displays as the object's own history rather than treating as damage to be removed.What remains genuinely unresolved is who made it, and whether it was ever meant for anyone but paying guests in the first place. The absence of any family crest or mention in a family's own papers argues for the second answer without quite settling the question. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1590** Unknown maker; first display uncertain between a private household and a Ware inn `[disputed]` (origin) The bed's construction date and place, Ware, Hertfordshire, are documented by the V&A. Its original purpose is not: it may have been commissioned privately and moved to an inn soon after, or built for the inn trade from the start. The V&A's own curatorial position now favours the second reading, based on the absence of family heraldry or any reference to the bed in family papers. - **-1596** The Crown, Ware (earliest tradition) `[unknown]` (display) The V&A's own account places an early, undated period at the Crown before the bed is first documented at the White Hart. No precise dates for this period are given in the sources consulted. - **1596-1706** The White Hart Inn, Ware `[documented]` (display) First securely dated by the 1596 reference in the travel diary of Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Kohten, and independently by Shakespeare's 1601 reference and Ben Jonson's 1609 reference, both consistent with the bed being a well-known Ware attraction across this period. - **1706** The George, Ware `[documented]` (display) Documented by the V&A for 1706. The date it left the George for a second period at the Crown is not given in the sources consulted. - **-1765** The Crown, Ware (second period) `[documented]` (display) The V&A's account records a return to the Crown before the final move to the Saracen's Head in 1765; exact start date not given. - **1765-1870** The Saracen's Head, Ware `[documented]` (display) The bed's longest single documented residence at one Ware inn. While here, in 1865, the South Kensington Museum, the V&A's own predecessor, was offered the chance to acquire it and refused, describing it as a coarse and mutilated relic not appropriate as a new acquisition. - **1870-1927** Rye House Hotel, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire `[documented]` (relocation and display) Installed in a purpose-built garden display as a pleasure-garden curiosity alongside other assembled antiquities. Remained here longer than at any single Ware inn on record. - **1927-1931** Cannon Brewery Ltd, then Frank Partridge and Sons Ltd, London dealers `[documented]` (sale) Cannon Brewery acquired the Rye House Hotel in 1927 and did not want the bed. It passed to the dealers Frank Partridge and Sons, of 26 King Street, London, who exhibited it amid concern, recorded in the V&A's own account, that it might be sold abroad, and who agreed to let the V&A have it at cost. - **1931-present** Victoria and Albert Museum, London `[documented]` (acquisition) Purchased for GBP 4,000, of which GBP 2,000 was contributed by the National Art Collections Fund (now the Art Fund). The V&A's own record states the purchase was made principally for the bed's historical and literary significance and to keep it in the country. On permanent display since; moved to the British Galleries, Room 57, in 2001; loaned to Ware Museum April 2012 to April 2013. ## Open questions - Who actually built the bed. No maker is named in any document from the 1590s, and the popular name, Jonas Fosbrooke, is traceable only to a nineteenth-century pantomime. - Was the bed commissioned privately and later moved into innkeeping, or built for the inn trade from the outset. The absence of heraldry favours the second reading but does not prove it. - Which specific engraved sheet or sheets by Hans Vredeman de Vries supplied the headboard's arched panel designs. The V&A states that no precise source print has been identified. - Exactly when the bed moved between the Crown, the White Hart and the George in Ware before 1706. The documented sequence has no precise dates for several of these early moves. - In which year, and at which London theatre, the pantomime that invented the Fosbrooke legend was first staged. Sources consulted give both 1839 and 1849 without resolving the conflict. - What the painted date of 1463 on the headboard was meant to establish, and when it was added. It is a century too early for the bed's real construction and is linked only loosely, by tradition, to Edward IV. - The exact act, scene and surrounding dialogue of Ben Jonson's 1609 reference in Epicoene. This record could confirm the year and the phrase 'the great bed at Ware' but could not verify the precise textual location against a scholarly edition. ## Sources - [1] Victoria and Albert Museum, Explore the Collections, 'Great Bed of Ware', museum no. W.47:1 to 28-1931, the museum's own catalogue record covering materials, dimensions, iconography, marks and inscriptions, and the acquisition and ownership history to 1931. - [2] Victoria and Albert Museum, 'The Great Bed of Ware' (article), covering the bed's history, fame and use as a paying attraction. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Great Bed of Ware', consulted for the ownership sequence including Rye House and the 1870 and 1927 transitions, the 1865 South Kensington Museum refusal, the Fosbrooke pantomime, and the Ben Jonson 1609 reference. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with primary or scholarly citations where the editor can locate them. - [4] Folger Shakespeare Library, Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 2, reading text, for the exact wording of Sir Toby Belch's line naming the bed of Ware. - [5] Cassidy Cash, 'The Great Bed of Ware' (Episode 282), a podcast on Shakespeare-era history featuring discussion attributed to Nick Humphrey, the V&A's curator of furniture and woodwork for this period, on the heraldry evidence and the aristocratic-commission versus inn-built dispute. Secondary source; flagged for verification against the curator's own published writing or the V&A's internal curatorial file. - [6] Ware Museum, 'The Great Bed of Ware', consulted for the bed's history as a tourist attraction and the treatment of its carved graffiti and wax seals. - [7] in2013dollars.com, UK Inflation Calculator, value of 1931 British pounds today, using the Office for National Statistics' composite price index (Consumer Price Index for recent years). - [8] 1900s.org.uk, 'House prices and inflation, based on costs from the 1930s and today', for the 1938 Edgware house price and 1939 weekly wage figures used for comparison. - [9] Wikipedia, 'Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art', consulted only to confirm the 1952 establishment date of the Waverley export-licensing system, to show it postdates the 1931 sale. Tertiary source. - [10] Wikimedia Commons API, extmetadata records for the five image files used in this record, consulted directly to verify each file's LicenseShortName, credited artist and date. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.